NIXON WOULD UNDERSTAND small pension in an unheated apartment, and Andreotti once adnutted in an inter- view that he could not recall her ever hav- ing kissed him. Andreotti became an al- tar boy and, showing an early sign of his political skill, organized the duties of all the other altar boys He got his start in political life as the protégé of Alcide De Gasperi, an old Catholic politician who had waited out the twenty-year reign of Fascism by working in the Vatican library. As a uni- versity student, Andreotti went to look for a book on the history of the Papal Navy. "Haven't you got anything better to do?" he was asked by the old librar- ian-De Gasperi, who was busy prepar- ing the new Christian Democratic Party, which would govern Italy after the war ended. Andreotti became De Gasperi's right-hand man. In the new, Catholic party, whose many leaders had vague and confused ideas and little practical experience, Andreotti rose rapidly to the top, because he showed a remarkable ability to cut straight to the heart of problems and solve them. He had an astonishing grasp of detail, a mastery of parliamentary pro- cedure, tact, and discretion, and a surpris- ing toughness in dealing with internal party politics. De Gas- peri was made Prime Minis- ter in the provisional post- war government in 1945, and Andreotti became his chief of staff in 1947, a Cabinet member at the age of twenty-eight. (Andreotti wept at his good for- tune, one of only three times he can recall having cried in his en- tire life. The others were when De Gasperi died, in 1954, and at his own mother's death, in 1976.) The Italian journalist Indro Montanelli once wrote, 'When De Gasperi and Andreotti went Æ to church together, De Gasperi talked to God, while Andreotti talked to the priest." During that " period, priests openly solicited votes for the Christian Demo- crats in order to ward off the Communist threat To under- stand Andreotti and the Chris- tian Democrats, it is essential to remember that the Party was born out of the ashes of the lJl ^. , war. The country was literally in ruins, and Fascists and Communists, on the verge of civil war for many years, kept their guns well oiled beneath their beds. "De Gasperi was against exacerbating conflict," Andreotti says. "He taught us to search for compromise, to mediate." To keep anyone party from growing too strong, De Gasperi favored a propor- tional political system, which led to the creation of at least a dozen different par- ties. While this system did prevent the return of dictatorship, it made strong, stable government virtually impossible and led to the kind of revolving-door ad- ministrations that have characterized Italian life ever since. In this world of constant compromise and negotiation, politics was not so much a matter of formulating and executing programs as an endless process of horse-trading, patclung together and maintaining frag- ile alliances, and dividing up the spoils of government. The climate of eternal emergency brought about by collapsing governments meant that expediency al- most always won out over principle, as crucial votes were traded for key ministe- rial jobs, bank presidencies, and pork- barrel projects. De Gasperi was well : ": . .'.'L .. '.':'1,ji. 71 aware of the risks of this system. When another Christian Democratic leader suggested an Anglo-American major- itarian system, he replied, "In an ideal world, you would be right: if we were making a shoe for the foot of Apollo, then we would need to make a perfect shoe, but we have to make a shoe to fit a gnarled, old foot." Perhaps more than any other figure, Andreotti was the symbol of the protean nature of the D.C.; he is a political cha- meleon who has changed colors numer- ous times. He started out as the leader of the right wing of the Party and, in the nineteen-fifties, bitterly opposed any rap- prochement with the Socialist Party. But in the mid-sixties Andreotti served, along with his former adversaries, in the first center-left coalition government. Instead of resisting calls for change, the Christian Democrats were brilliant at coäpting the political opposition and turning it into a force of conservation And so it was with the Socialists. The D. C. agreed to create a vast social safety net, and then used it to expand the Party's patronage system. 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